The extent of participation in Europe

Abstract

Employee participation is an important element of the European Social Model and this paper focuses on the extent of the different forms of participation - representative participation; direct participation; and financial participation, as measured in the European Foundation's EPOC survey. The paper examines the findings on these different types of participation separately and finally compares the levels of participation by combining all three systems. By taking this approach, important differences were found across the ten countries surveyed, with Sweden showing the strongest implementation of all types of participation, while Portugal is the weakest, in particular in representation participation arrangements. The paper indicates that there is a wide gap between the desired objective of the European Social Model and the practice of participation in Europe.